I Threw Away $7

I Threw Away $7

I Threw Away $7.6 Million In Bitcoin

Five years ago, I threw away a hard drive. An utterly generic 250GB portable hard drive, already a few years old, with a duo of dings and scrapes in its shell and with the beginnings of an audible click that would have eventually killed it.

It had a data file containing one thousand four hundred Bitcoin on it. No big deal, at the time.

Today, those few kilobytes are worth more than four million seven million dollars.

AU Editor’s Note, 15/08/17: So, the price of Bitcoin smashed through the $US4000 barrier yesterday. I just did the maths, and instead of $Four.Two million, my 1400BTC would now be worth $7.6 million. It seemed like the right time to share this with you all again. C’est la vie, I guess. — Cam

So I Bought Some Bitcoin

In 2010, when the Bitcoin price was like 1.Five US cents — if you could find a place that would even sell them to you — I bought $25 worth.

To be fair, the details are a bit foggy these days. My best recreation of my potential brush with incredible riches comes from everything else that was happening at the time. When I moved out of home, when I moved back home, when I broke up with a gf, when I PayPal’d some random stranger from the other side of the world a few US dollars for a digital transaction of an effectively worthless faux-currency.

At the begin of 2010, Bitcoin trading wasn’t even indeed a thing. It was hard to find anywhere that would sell BTC. Mining coins — with your PC’s CPU, then with your PC’s graphics card, then with specialised and increasingly expensive hardware — was the easiest way to accumulate Bitcoin out of skinny air, with the only investment being violet wand and processor cycles.

But I found a site, or forum — I can’t reminisce which — where someone was selling Bitcoin. I think I paid well above the quasi-official exchange rate for the coins; who truly cares about the difference inbetween 1.Two cents and 1.Five cents when you’re only spending $25? I’d read something joy about them, very likely in WIRED, and dreamed to understand them better, so I bought some.

Eventually, I had the Bitcoin sitting in a cold storage wallet — an offline file, outside of any online bank or exchange or digital storage facility. A text file, basically, with a long string of cryptographic hash that represented an encryption key. I didn’t trust any online service not to crash and lose my investment.

I put on a hard drive.

I used the hard drive for a entire bunch of things. Storing pirated music and movies and TV series, a portfolio of my best tech writing work, all my uni assignments, photos of friends and family and the duo of holidays that I’d taken. I took the hard drive with me when I moved out of home with my long-term gf, and used it for all the things you use a portable hard drive for.

In the year or so that followed, we broke up, and I moved back home. As I was moving out I used the chance to clean up some of the accumulated tech detritus that comes with being a technology journalist. USB stuffs, 3D glasses, USB cables, PC components — all that sort of literal junk. A pile of junk that went into a skip. That hard drive was in the pile, and it had that damn annoying click. I had better portable hard drives.

I didn’t need, or care about, anything on it. The photos were backed up to another portable drive, my writing was in Google Drive, the music was on my desktop PC.

So I threw it away.

It Truly Wasn’t A Big Deal, Guys

This is most likely one of the stupidest things, in hindsight, that I've ever done. And I've done a lot of stupid things a lot of times.

I think I remembered the Bitcoin a duo of months later. I know that I actually remembered them because of something else on the drive — a terrible quality pirated copy of The Hire, BMW’s brief car-porn vignettes staring Clive Owen, which was and is still hard to find on the ‘net. Remembering that on the drive made me think about what else was there — including a little digital marker for 1400-odd Bitcoin.

When I remembered that I’d thrown away my Bitcoin stash, I was a little bit pissed off. In inbetween the time that I’d frittered away $25 over the ‘net and the day I remembered how many BTC I’d actually thrown away, the price had skyrocketed — relatively — from hardly more than a cent to around $Two.50 per coin. $4000, give or take, was what my loss was. I was in a bit of debt from a holiday to Japan a while before, and that four grand would have been nice.

It wasn’t a big deal. It was one of those “aw, shit” moments that happen to everyone on a semi-regular basis. I got a parking ticket, I left behind to send a bday card to a friend overseas — that kind of thing. Without the benefit of hindsight, of course, it wasn’t that big a deal. I think I got a promotion around that time that more than made up for my lost investment. Bitcoin was a joy fad.

Obviously time and the ‘net have proven me wrong.

Time has been kind of the price of Bitcoin. Every now and then since, when I’ve seen Bitcoin in the news or reported on Gizmodo or mentioned in reference to world events like the WannaCry malware, I’ve checked the price. Bitcoin has become pretty popular since 2011. And I’ve done a bit of back-of-the-napkin calculation, and — sometimes, not every time — had a bit of a quiet moment and a wiggle of my head.

At the moment, at a historic high price in USD and AUD alike, my one thousand four hundred BTC would be worth $Four.8 million $7.6 million — and switch. The price, always frantically volatile, is skyrocketing at the moment. When I very first tweeted this story, it was $Four.Two million, but in the two days since it went up fifteen per cent. In the three months since, it’s up another eighty per cent on that.

It’ll very likely go higher.

What Happens Now?

I'm generally pretty easygoing in life, I think, and I can laugh about it for like ninety five per cent of the time, but also, man. Man. What if.

Honestly, as far as I’m worried, my stash of ‘coin is gone.

In the past duo of days, since I told my story, I’ve been contacted by friends and strangers alike with advice and suggestions — and some hare-brained proposals — on how to retrieve my Bitcoin.

Evidently landfill is exceedingly well organised and stratified. And my trash would be with other trash of the same age, with dates and locations and other clues along the path to a dented hard drive in a pile of USB cables. I could contact the peak or the council in the area that I rented that apartment in, and see if they could point me in the right direction. Police do it all the time.

One friend said that all I’d need to do is find someone willing to take a quarter stake in it — on spec, of course, I don’t have a million bucks — to make it worth that person’s time to track it down. But then that raises questions of its own — what if someone else found the hard drive, that used to be my hard drive, very first? What right would I have to that text file?

Strangers on Twitter — fairly a few of them, truly — have told me to dual down and to invest in Eth. I’m fine, thanks. My dalliance with volatile digital currencies is over. I’ve learned my lesson, whatever it is. And I still have some Dogecoin, anyway.

I don’t even especially want to find those Bitcoin, tho’. I’m indeed glad with my life at the moment. I don’t need them. I’d like them, sure, but I don’t need them. This isn’t attempting to get philosophical — the real value was in the friends we made along the way, or some crap like that — but just to say that I’ve come to terms with losing those Bitcoin. That chapter of my life is over.

I spent $25 on some Bitcoin. When I realised what I’d lost, they were worth about $4000. If you desired to put a dollar figure on the anguish that I feel, it’d be somewhere inbetween those two. Certainly not in the sphere of millions of dollars. It’s mostly a joy story that I trot out every now and then, and from time to time pretend to be mock-upset about, and only sometimes actually upset.

Do you have any regrets? I sure do. But in the scheme of things, this is only indeed a puny one.

I Threw Away $7

I Threw Away $7.6 Million In Bitcoin

Five years ago, I threw away a hard drive. An utterly generic 250GB portable hard drive, already a few years old, with a duo of dings and scrapes in its shell and with the beginnings of an audible click that would have eventually killed it.

It had a data file containing one thousand four hundred Bitcoin on it. No big deal, at the time.

Today, those few kilobytes are worth more than four million seven million dollars.

AU Editor’s Note, 15/08/17: So, the price of Bitcoin smashed through the $US4000 barrier yesterday. I just did the maths, and instead of $Four.Two million, my 1400BTC would now be worth $7.6 million. It seemed like the right time to share this with you all again. C’est la vie, I guess. — Cam

So I Bought Some Bitcoin

In 2010, when the Bitcoin price was like 1.Five US cents — if you could find a place that would even sell them to you — I bought $25 worth.

To be fair, the details are a bit foggy these days. My best recreation of my potential brush with incredible riches comes from everything else that was happening at the time. When I moved out of home, when I moved back home, when I broke up with a gf, when I PayPal’d some random stranger from the other side of the world a few US dollars for a digital transaction of an effectively worthless faux-currency.

At the embark of 2010, Bitcoin trading wasn’t even truly a thing. It was hard to find anywhere that would sell BTC. Mining coins — with your PC’s CPU, then with your PC’s graphics card, then with specialised and increasingly expensive hardware — was the easiest way to accumulate Bitcoin out of skinny air, with the only investment being tens unit and processor cycles.

But I found a site, or forum — I can’t recall which — where someone was selling Bitcoin. I think I paid well above the quasi-official exchange rate for the coins; who indeed cares about the difference inbetween 1.Two cents and 1.Five cents when you’re only spending $25? I’d read something joy about them, most likely in WIRED, and wished to understand them better, so I bought some.

Eventually, I had the Bitcoin sitting in a cold storage wallet — an offline file, outside of any online bank or exchange or digital storage facility. A text file, basically, with a long string of cryptographic hash that represented an encryption key. I didn’t trust any online service not to crash and lose my investment.

I put on a hard drive.

I used the hard drive for a entire bunch of things. Storing pirated music and movies and TV series, a portfolio of my best tech writing work, all my uni assignments, photos of friends and family and the duo of holidays that I’d taken. I took the hard drive with me when I moved out of home with my long-term gf, and used it for all the things you use a portable hard drive for.

In the year or so that followed, we broke up, and I moved back home. As I was moving out I used the chance to clean up some of the accumulated tech detritus that comes with being a technology journalist. USB rams, 3D glasses, USB cables, PC components — all that sort of literal junk. A pile of junk that went into a skip. That hard drive was in the pile, and it had that damn annoying click. I had better portable hard drives.

I didn’t need, or care about, anything on it. The photos were backed up to another portable drive, my writing was in Google Drive, the music was on my desktop PC.

So I threw it away.

It Indeed Wasn’t A Big Deal, Guys

This is most likely one of the stupidest things, in hindsight, that I've ever done. And I've done a lot of stupid things a lot of times.

I think I remembered the Bitcoin a duo of months later. I know that I actually remembered them because of something else on the drive — a terrible quality pirated copy of The Hire, BMW’s brief car-porn vignettes staring Clive Owen, which was and is still hard to find on the ‘net. Remembering that on the drive made me think about what else was there — including a little digital marker for 1400-odd Bitcoin.

When I remembered that I’d thrown away my Bitcoin stash, I was a little bit pissed off. In inbetween the time that I’d frittered away $25 over the ‘net and the day I remembered how many BTC I’d actually thrown away, the price had skyrocketed — relatively — from scarcely more than a cent to around $Two.50 per coin. $4000, give or take, was what my loss was. I was in a bit of debt from a holiday to Japan a while before, and that four grand would have been nice.

It wasn’t a big deal. It was one of those “aw, shit” moments that happen to everyone on a semi-regular basis. I got a parking ticket, I left behind to send a bday card to a friend overseas — that kind of thing. Without the benefit of hindsight, of course, it wasn’t that big a deal. I think I got a promotion around that time that more than made up for my lost investment. Bitcoin was a joy fad.

Obviously time and the ‘net have proven me wrong.

Time has been kind of the price of Bitcoin. Every now and then since, when I’ve seen Bitcoin in the news or reported on Gizmodo or mentioned in reference to world events like the WannaCry malware, I’ve checked the price. Bitcoin has become pretty popular since 2011. And I’ve done a bit of back-of-the-napkin calculation, and — sometimes, not every time — had a bit of a quiet moment and a wiggle of my head.

At the moment, at a historic high price in USD and AUD alike, my one thousand four hundred BTC would be worth $Four.8 million $7.6 million — and switch. The price, always frantically volatile, is skyrocketing at the moment. When I very first tweeted this story, it was $Four.Two million, but in the two days since it went up fifteen per cent. In the three months since, it’s up another eighty per cent on that.

It’ll very likely go higher.

What Happens Now?

I'm generally pretty easygoing in life, I think, and I can laugh about it for like ninety five per cent of the time, but also, man. Man. What if.

Honestly, as far as I’m worried, my stash of ‘coin is gone.

In the past duo of days, since I told my story, I’ve been contacted by friends and strangers alike with advice and suggestions — and some hare-brained proposals — on how to retrieve my Bitcoin.

Evidently landfill is exceedingly well organised and stratified. And my trash would be with other trash of the same age, with dates and locations and other clues along the path to a dented hard drive in a pile of USB cables. I could contact the peak or the council in the area that I rented that apartment in, and see if they could point me in the right direction. Police do it all the time.

One friend said that all I’d need to do is find someone willing to take a quarter stake in it — on spec, of course, I don’t have a million bucks — to make it worth that person’s time to track it down. But then that raises questions of its own — what if someone else found the hard drive, that used to be my hard drive, very first? What right would I have to that text file?

Strangers on Twitter — fairly a few of them, truly — have told me to dual down and to invest in Eth. I’m fine, thanks. My dalliance with volatile digital currencies is over. I’ve learned my lesson, whatever it is. And I still have some Dogecoin, anyway.

I don’t even especially want to find those Bitcoin, however. I’m truly glad with my life at the moment. I don’t need them. I’d like them, sure, but I don’t need them. This isn’t attempting to get philosophical — the real value was in the friends we made along the way, or some crap like that — but just to say that I’ve come to terms with losing those Bitcoin. That chapter of my life is over.

I spent $25 on some Bitcoin. When I realised what I’d lost, they were worth about $4000. If you dreamed to put a dollar figure on the anguish that I feel, it’d be somewhere inbetween those two. Undoubtedly not in the field of millions of dollars. It’s mostly a joy story that I trot out every now and then, and at times pretend to be mock-upset about, and only periodically actually upset.

Do you have any regrets? I sure do. But in the scheme of things, this is only indeed a puny one.

I Threw Away $7

I Threw Away $7.6 Million In Bitcoin

Five years ago, I threw away a hard drive. An utterly generic 250GB portable hard drive, already a few years old, with a duo of dings and scrapes in its shell and with the beginnings of an audible click that would have eventually killed it.

It had a data file containing one thousand four hundred Bitcoin on it. No big deal, at the time.

Today, those few kilobytes are worth more than four million seven million dollars.

AU Editor’s Note, 15/08/17: So, the price of Bitcoin smashed through the $US4000 barrier yesterday. I just did the maths, and instead of $Four.Two million, my 1400BTC would now be worth $7.6 million. It seemed like the right time to share this with you all again. C’est la vie, I guess. — Cam

So I Bought Some Bitcoin

In 2010, when the Bitcoin price was like 1.Five US cents — if you could find a place that would even sell them to you — I bought $25 worth.

To be fair, the details are a bit foggy these days. My best recreation of my potential brush with incredible riches comes from everything else that was happening at the time. When I moved out of home, when I moved back home, when I broke up with a gf, when I PayPal’d some random stranger from the other side of the world a few US dollars for a digital transaction of an effectively worthless faux-currency.

At the commence of 2010, Bitcoin trading wasn’t even truly a thing. It was hard to find anywhere that would sell BTC. Mining coins — with your PC’s CPU, then with your PC’s graphics card, then with specialised and increasingly expensive hardware — was the easiest way to accumulate Bitcoin out of lean air, with the only investment being electric current and processor cycles.

But I found a site, or forum — I can’t reminisce which — where someone was selling Bitcoin. I think I paid well above the quasi-official exchange rate for the coins; who indeed cares about the difference inbetween 1.Two cents and 1.Five cents when you’re only spending $25? I’d read something joy about them, very likely in WIRED, and desired to understand them better, so I bought some.

Eventually, I had the Bitcoin sitting in a cold storage wallet — an offline file, outside of any online bank or exchange or digital storage facility. A text file, basically, with a long string of cryptographic hash that represented an encryption key. I didn’t trust any online service not to crash and lose my investment.

I put on a hard drive.

I used the hard drive for a entire bunch of things. Storing pirated music and movies and TV series, a portfolio of my best tech writing work, all my uni assignments, photos of friends and family and the duo of holidays that I’d taken. I took the hard drive with me when I moved out of home with my long-term gf, and used it for all the things you use a portable hard drive for.

In the year or so that followed, we broke up, and I moved back home. As I was moving out I used the chance to clean up some of the accumulated tech detritus that comes with being a technology journalist. USB jams, 3D glasses, USB cables, PC components — all that sort of literal junk. A pile of junk that went into a skip. That hard drive was in the pile, and it had that damn annoying click. I had better portable hard drives.

I didn’t need, or care about, anything on it. The photos were backed up to another portable drive, my writing was in Google Drive, the music was on my desktop PC.

So I threw it away.

It Indeed Wasn’t A Big Deal, Guys

This is most likely one of the stupidest things, in hindsight, that I've ever done. And I've done a lot of stupid things a lot of times.

I think I remembered the Bitcoin a duo of months later. I know that I actually remembered them because of something else on the drive — a terrible quality pirated copy of The Hire, BMW’s brief car-porn vignettes staring Clive Owen, which was and is still hard to find on the ‘net. Remembering that on the drive made me think about what else was there — including a little digital marker for 1400-odd Bitcoin.

When I remembered that I’d thrown away my Bitcoin stash, I was a little bit pissed off. In inbetween the time that I’d frittered away $25 over the ‘net and the day I remembered how many BTC I’d actually thrown away, the price had skyrocketed — relatively — from hardly more than a cent to around $Two.50 per coin. $4000, give or take, was what my loss was. I was in a bit of debt from a holiday to Japan a while before, and that four grand would have been nice.

It wasn’t a big deal. It was one of those “aw, shit” moments that happen to everyone on a semi-regular basis. I got a parking ticket, I left behind to send a bday card to a friend overseas — that kind of thing. Without the benefit of hindsight, of course, it wasn’t that big a deal. I think I got a promotion around that time that more than made up for my lost investment. Bitcoin was a joy fad.

Obviously time and the ‘net have proven me wrong.

Time has been kind of the price of Bitcoin. Every now and then since, when I’ve seen Bitcoin in the news or reported on Gizmodo or mentioned in reference to world events like the WannaCry malware, I’ve checked the price. Bitcoin has become pretty popular since 2011. And I’ve done a bit of back-of-the-napkin calculation, and — sometimes, not every time — had a bit of a quiet moment and a wiggle of my head.

At the moment, at a historic high price in USD and AUD alike, my one thousand four hundred BTC would be worth $Four.8 million $7.6 million — and switch. The price, always frantically volatile, is skyrocketing at the moment. When I very first tweeted this story, it was $Four.Two million, but in the two days since it went up fifteen per cent. In the three months since, it’s up another eighty per cent on that.

It’ll very likely go higher.

What Happens Now?

I'm generally pretty easygoing in life, I think, and I can laugh about it for like ninety five per cent of the time, but also, man. Man. What if.

Honestly, as far as I’m worried, my stash of ‘coin is gone.

In the past duo of days, since I told my story, I’ve been contacted by friends and strangers alike with advice and suggestions — and some hare-brained proposals — on how to retrieve my Bitcoin.

Evidently landfill is exceedingly well organised and stratified. And my trash would be with other trash of the same age, with dates and locations and other clues along the path to a dented hard drive in a pile of USB cables. I could contact the peak or the council in the area that I rented that apartment in, and see if they could point me in the right direction. Police do it all the time.

One friend said that all I’d need to do is find someone willing to take a quarter stake in it — on spec, of course, I don’t have a million bucks — to make it worth that person’s time to track it down. But then that raises questions of its own — what if someone else found the hard drive, that used to be my hard drive, very first? What right would I have to that text file?

Strangers on Twitter — fairly a few of them, indeed — have told me to dual down and to invest in Eth. I’m fine, thanks. My dalliance with volatile digital currencies is over. I’ve learned my lesson, whatever it is. And I still have some Dogecoin, anyway.

I don’t even especially want to find those Bitcoin, tho’. I’m indeed glad with my life at the moment. I don’t need them. I’d like them, sure, but I don’t need them. This isn’t attempting to get philosophical — the real value was in the friends we made along the way, or some crap like that — but just to say that I’ve come to terms with losing those Bitcoin. That chapter of my life is over.

I spent $25 on some Bitcoin. When I realised what I’d lost, they were worth about $4000. If you dreamed to put a dollar figure on the anguish that I feel, it’d be somewhere inbetween those two. Certainly not in the sphere of millions of dollars. It’s mostly a joy story that I trot out every now and then, and periodically pretend to be mock-upset about, and only at times actually upset.

Do you have any regrets? I sure do. But in the scheme of things, this is only truly a puny one.

I Threw Away $7

I Threw Away $7.6 Million In Bitcoin

Five years ago, I threw away a hard drive. An utterly generic 250GB portable hard drive, already a few years old, with a duo of dings and scrapes in its shell and with the beginnings of an audible click that would have eventually killed it.

It had a data file containing one thousand four hundred Bitcoin on it. No big deal, at the time.

Today, those few kilobytes are worth more than four million seven million dollars.

AU Editor’s Note, 15/08/17: So, the price of Bitcoin smashed through the $US4000 barrier yesterday. I just did the maths, and instead of $Four.Two million, my 1400BTC would now be worth $7.6 million. It seemed like the right time to share this with you all again. C’est la vie, I guess. — Cam

So I Bought Some Bitcoin

In 2010, when the Bitcoin price was like 1.Five US cents — if you could find a place that would even sell them to you — I bought $25 worth.

To be fair, the details are a bit foggy these days. My best recreation of my potential brush with incredible riches comes from everything else that was happening at the time. When I moved out of home, when I moved back home, when I broke up with a gf, when I PayPal’d some random stranger from the other side of the world a few US dollars for a digital transaction of an effectively worthless faux-currency.

At the embark of 2010, Bitcoin trading wasn’t even indeed a thing. It was hard to find anywhere that would sell BTC. Mining coins — with your PC’s CPU, then with your PC’s graphics card, then with specialised and increasingly expensive hardware — was the easiest way to accumulate Bitcoin out of lean air, with the only investment being tens unit and processor cycles.

But I found a site, or forum — I can’t recall which — where someone was selling Bitcoin. I think I paid well above the quasi-official exchange rate for the coins; who truly cares about the difference inbetween 1.Two cents and 1.Five cents when you’re only spending $25? I’d read something joy about them, most likely in WIRED, and wished to understand them better, so I bought some.

Eventually, I had the Bitcoin sitting in a cold storage wallet — an offline file, outside of any online bank or exchange or digital storage facility. A text file, basically, with a long string of cryptographic hash that represented an encryption key. I didn’t trust any online service not to crash and lose my investment.

I put on a hard drive.

I used the hard drive for a entire bunch of things. Storing pirated music and movies and TV series, a portfolio of my best tech writing work, all my uni assignments, photos of friends and family and the duo of holidays that I’d taken. I took the hard drive with me when I moved out of home with my long-term gf, and used it for all the things you use a portable hard drive for.

In the year or so that followed, we broke up, and I moved back home. As I was moving out I used the chance to clean up some of the accumulated tech detritus that comes with being a technology journalist. USB plunges, 3D glasses, USB cables, PC components — all that sort of literal junk. A pile of junk that went into a skip. That hard drive was in the pile, and it had that damn annoying click. I had better portable hard drives.

I didn’t need, or care about, anything on it. The photos were backed up to another portable drive, my writing was in Google Drive, the music was on my desktop PC.

So I threw it away.

It Indeed Wasn’t A Big Deal, Guys

This is very likely one of the stupidest things, in hindsight, that I've ever done. And I've done a lot of stupid things a lot of times.

I think I remembered the Bitcoin a duo of months later. I know that I actually remembered them because of something else on the drive — a terrible quality pirated copy of The Hire, BMW’s brief car-porn vignettes staring Clive Owen, which was and is still hard to find on the ‘net. Remembering that on the drive made me think about what else was there — including a little digital marker for 1400-odd Bitcoin.

When I remembered that I’d thrown away my Bitcoin stash, I was a little bit pissed off. In inbetween the time that I’d frittered away $25 over the ‘net and the day I remembered how many BTC I’d actually thrown away, the price had skyrocketed — relatively — from hardly more than a cent to around $Two.50 per coin. $4000, give or take, was what my loss was. I was in a bit of debt from a holiday to Japan a while before, and that four grand would have been nice.

It wasn’t a big deal. It was one of those “aw, shit” moments that happen to everyone on a semi-regular basis. I got a parking ticket, I left behind to send a bday card to a friend overseas — that kind of thing. Without the benefit of hindsight, of course, it wasn’t that big a deal. I think I got a promotion around that time that more than made up for my lost investment. Bitcoin was a joy fad.

Obviously time and the ‘net have proven me wrong.

Time has been kind of the price of Bitcoin. Every now and then since, when I’ve seen Bitcoin in the news or reported on Gizmodo or mentioned in reference to world events like the WannaCry malware, I’ve checked the price. Bitcoin has become pretty popular since 2011. And I’ve done a bit of back-of-the-napkin calculation, and — sometimes, not every time — had a bit of a quiet moment and a jiggle of my head.

At the moment, at a historic high price in USD and AUD alike, my one thousand four hundred BTC would be worth $Four.8 million $7.6 million — and switch. The price, always frantically volatile, is skyrocketing at the moment. When I very first tweeted this story, it was $Four.Two million, but in the two days since it went up fifteen per cent. In the three months since, it’s up another eighty per cent on that.

It’ll very likely go higher.

What Happens Now?

I'm generally pretty easygoing in life, I think, and I can laugh about it for like ninety five per cent of the time, but also, man. Man. What if.

Honestly, as far as I’m worried, my stash of ‘coin is gone.

In the past duo of days, since I told my story, I’ve been contacted by friends and strangers alike with advice and suggestions — and some hare-brained proposals — on how to retrieve my Bitcoin.

Evidently landfill is exceedingly well organised and stratified. And my trash would be with other trash of the same age, with dates and locations and other clues along the path to a dented hard drive in a pile of USB cables. I could contact the peak or the council in the area that I rented that apartment in, and see if they could point me in the right direction. Police do it all the time.

One friend said that all I’d need to do is find someone willing to take a quarter stake in it — on spec, of course, I don’t have a million bucks — to make it worth that person’s time to track it down. But then that raises questions of its own — what if someone else found the hard drive, that used to be my hard drive, very first? What right would I have to that text file?

Strangers on Twitter — fairly a few of them, indeed — have told me to dual down and to invest in Eth. I’m fine, thanks. My dalliance with volatile digital currencies is over. I’ve learned my lesson, whatever it is. And I still have some Dogecoin, anyway.

I don’t even especially want to find those Bitcoin, however. I’m indeed blessed with my life at the moment. I don’t need them. I’d like them, sure, but I don’t need them. This isn’t attempting to get philosophical — the real value was in the friends we made along the way, or some crap like that — but just to say that I’ve come to terms with losing those Bitcoin. That chapter of my life is over.

I spent $25 on some Bitcoin. When I realised what I’d lost, they were worth about $4000. If you wished to put a dollar figure on the anguish that I feel, it’d be somewhere inbetween those two. Certainly not in the sphere of millions of dollars. It’s mostly a joy story that I trot out every now and then, and periodically pretend to be mock-upset about, and only periodically actually upset.

Do you have any regrets? I sure do. But in the scheme of things, this is only indeed a petite one.

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